So Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Mini and Galaxy S4 Active have officially made the leap from unimaginative rumors to unimaginative reality, which leaves only one oft-rumored version of the popular smartphone left unaccounted for — the curious S4 Zoom.

As the name sort of implies, this Galaxy variant is said to blur the line between smartphone and camera, and we may now be getting our first look at the thing. A set of images from both SamMobile and TechTastic purportedly show off the photo-centric S4 Zoom ahead of a big Samsung press event in London later this month.

It’s hard to judge from the unflattering angles, but these images depict a device seems to be more camera than phone. The thickish frame, protruding lens obscuring a 16-megapixel sensor, and rounded butt are all design choices that are more reminiscent of point-and-shoots than they are of any standard smartphone. Too bad then that the supposed spec sheet that’s been attached to the S4 Zoom seems wimpy in comparison — that hefty sensor will supposedly be accompanied by a 4.3-inch qHD AMOLED display and a 1.6GHz dual-core processor.

If the S4 Zoom is indeed the real deal — and at this point it just about seems like a lock — Samsung may find that it’s not alone in using smartphones as a platform to show off their camera prowess. Persistent rumors of a Nokia Windows Phone sporting one of the company’s mind-boggling PureView sensors have been floating around for over a year now, and a handful of spurious “leaked” images of one such device (codenamed “EOS “)have been circulating these past days. Hell, just earlier this morning we were treated to what may be the smoking gun — a purported recording of the EOS’ gigantic rear camera pod blinking at us.

In case you missed the PureView hullabaloo from last year, Nokia’s EOS isn’t expected to feature the comparatively puny sensors seen in the company’s recent Windows Phones. No no, rumor has it that it will instead sport the same 41-megapixel camera sensor that first graced the chubby 808 PureView back in 2012.

But I think there’s a bigger question here that hasn’t been adequately answered yet — who do these companies think we’ll buy these things? I suspect I may be in the minority on this one, but I’ve always though that the camera-first approach that some OEMs fiddle around with is just sort of silly. Yes, there’s definite value in being able to capture compelling shots on the run, but really: do people really care how good their photos look once quality inches past a certain threshold?

After all, the way we visually memorialize things has changed since the dawn of smartphone epoch — most images don’t wind up printed and tucked away in photo albums any more. They get hastily MMSed to friends. They get marred by fugly filters and splayed up on Instagram. And in some cases (I’m looking at you Snapchat), the real value of these photos is knowing that they’ll quickly be lost to the ages, a pointed rejection of the archaic permanence of images chemically etched on dead tree material. Camera quality ranks pretty low on my list of criteria when it comes time to buy a new phone, and leaning too heavily on one aspect of a device could be… problematic to say the least.

The closest thing Samsung has had to the S4 Zoom to date is the Galaxy Camera, and the company has never broken out Galaxy Camera sales for we hardware business dorks to dig into. Still, the device was hamstrung by carriers requiring customers to buy a data plan along with the thing (a Wi-Fi version was announced just two months ago). And while Nokia has kept its PureView numbers a closely guarded secret, enthusiasts have estimated that the Finnish phone company managed to sell over half a million as of Fall 2012.

That’s a very solid number considering all the 808′s potential sticking points, and Nokia’s moving a solid number of Lumia phones these days so Nokia must be hoping that PureView and Lumia are two great tastes that really do taste great together. Thankfully, we probably won’t have to wait much longer to see these two duke it out — while the S4 Zoom is expected to be outed this month, the EOS could see the light of day as early as July 9.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Airport car rental startup Silvercar has increased the number of markets it hopes to launch in by the end of the year, as it seeks to more aggressively make its services available to more potential customers. Now available at three airports, it hopes to add a fourth by the end of the month, and expects to be in seven different markets by the end of 2013.

I’ve been covering Silvercar almost since its launch, and even got a chance to try it out for myself several months ago.* The idea behind the service is that it provides a simple, on-demand way to rent an awesome car online or via mobile phone. The app works by offering users a mobile app for booking, unlocking, and powering services while renting the car.

Silvercar offers one make and model of automobile — the Audi A4 — which simplifies the process of stocking inventory and renting out cars. Since it doesn’t have to handle multiple different classes of vehicle, customers don’t have to worry about different prices of rentals or trying to find just the right car.

Having one type of vehicle also makes opening up at new airports extremely easy for the startup. Well, easy-er. It still needs to deal with finding space near whichever airport it hopes to launch in, you know, a place to stage inventory and have customers pick up their cars.

In its launch market at Dallas/Fort Worth, Silvercar is part of the airport’s ConRAC (consolidated rental car facility). At launch, the idea was that it would gradually introduce services in other ConRACs over time. But there was a problem with that model — openings in those facilities only pop up every now and then, which means that Silvercar’s ability to expand was limited by external forces.

Starting in Austin, Silvercar began testing a way to get around that problem. To make its cars available there, it found space a few minutes near the airport to house its cars. From a user experience perspective, in airports that don’t have ConRACs, customers are able to hit a button once their planes have landed to indicate that they’ve arrived. They then get picked up by a Silvercar employee in a courtesy car, who drives the customer to the nearby lot. Once there, they pick the car they want, scan it with the mobile app, and are on their way.

The service was sold out during SXSW and led the company to keep a presence there. After that success, the company decided to make cars available at Dallas Love Field as well. But it’s looking to move outside of Texas and expects its service to launch in another (unnamed) market by the end of this month.

When we first talked to Silvercar about its expansion plans, the company was targeting one new airport each quarter. Now it’s looking to expand into two per quarter. With three airports now and half a year ahead of it, that means it’ll probably be in seven by the end of the year.

Silvercar raised $11.5 million in series A funding led by Austin Ventures, with participation from CrunchFund, SV Angel, Chris Dixon, and Dave Morin.

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* Disclosures galore: Silvercar is a CrunchFund portfolio company. That’s important because CrunchFund was started by Michael Arrington, also founder of this website. That test drive of my Silvercar rental at Dallas-Fort Worth back in January was partially paid for by the company. Silvercar also sponsored our recent Austin meetup, offering us a few cars for use during the meetup in exchange for a table and branding at the event.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Oh HTC. You’ve produced one of the finest Android smartphones ever (seriously, just look at all these reviews), but you’ve faced more than your share of challenges when it came to actually pumping your top-tier One smartphone. As it happens, that may all soon change.

FocusTaiwan reported earlier today that HTC is preparing to pump out more of its wonderful Ones in short order — Jack Tong, the company’s North Asia president, noted that this month’s production capacity for the flagship device is twice that of April, and that surge will only continue into June.

Sounds pretty yawn-worthy, right? Normally I would spend too much time dwelling on the finer points of production capacity, but here’s a device that was launched to widespread praise by an underdog smartphone company some people have written off, and HTC has basically been getting screwed thanks to part shortages for the One’s Ultrapixel camera and a brief injunction due to the HDR microphone it uses. It’s like a perfect storm of headaches for a company that really, really doesn’t need it — one look at its Q1 financials and it’s clear that HTC needed this launch to go as smoothly as possible. It didn’t.

For what it’s worth, HTC hasn’t disclosed how many Ones it’s shipped since it launched earlier this year. Meanwhile, rival Samsung’s Galaxy S4 has become the Korean electronics giant’s fastest moving smartphone — Samsung shipped 6 million units in just over two weeks, and it hopes to cross the 10 million unit threshold by the end of this month. Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that Google’s Hugo Barra showed off a version of the S4 at the company’s I/O developer conference that runs a version of Android that’s unfettered by the software bloat that many a reviewer took umbrage at. Company representatives were careful not to call it a Nexus — even though it seems to harbor many of the advantages inherent to the Nexus line like a clean Android build and access to frequent software updates.

As I noted towards the end of my HTC One review, the wireless industry isn’t a meritocracy — the well-executed device doesn’t always wind up saving the day. Hopefully now that some of these production woes have been ironed out we’ll see HTC live to fight another day, but that’s still far from a given.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Realmac Software is showing off its latest app today, ahead of a launch to come later in the month. The app is called Analog, and is an iPhone version of its desktop quick and easy photo manipulation software. I’ve been beta testing the software, and the experience it provides is in keeping with Realmac’s other recent mobile releases, like the super simple to-do app Clear it created in concert with Impending. So why does the world need yet another mobile photo app with filters? I asked Realmac Software head honcho Dan Counsell to find out.

“It seems like most of the current popular photo apps are competing on features, they keep cramming more and more into them to try and outdo each other,” he explained. “In doing this they have become overly complex and confusing for new users. Camera apps should be fun to use with a minimal interface that just stays out of the way allowing the user to focus on what really matters, their photos.”

That’s what Analog manages to achieve. It inherits this approach to simplified photo editing from the desktop version, but adds touch-specific interfaces and controls that are much better suited to the iPhone’s screen. These use a bold, flat design that emphasize clean lines, large hit hit points and a grid-like pattern that provides all your sharing and editing options in as few screens as is possible.

Another aspect of Analog’s simplicity is that it doesn’t try to replace the social networks you already use with a new one. That’s by design, according to Counsell.

“Online services come and go but by having an app that’s service agnostic we can easily adapt to change.,” he said. “Not to mention the fact that it’s easier for users to have one app that posts to multiple services rather than having to hop in and out of a bunch of different apps.”

Analog started out as an idea that was actually pretty far removed from mobile photography. Counsell said the original Mac app was inspired by his own love of photography, which inspired a need for software that wasn’t quite as daunting or involved as something like Photoshop.

“I love my DSLR and take the majority of my photos with it, so developing Analog for the Mac first was an easy decision,” he said. “After the Analog for Mac launch we had a lot of requests from users saying they wanted it on iOS, so we thought we’d give it a shot and see what happens.”

Realmac is behind Courier, LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver in addition to Clear, and has a solid reputation among Mac fans and iPhone users. Analog will be available on the iPhone at launch a little later on this month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has quit his position as a U.K. director of the company, days after Twitter subsidiary TweetDeck was dissolved as a separate U.K. business by business registrar Companies House, according to Sky News. We’ve reached out to Twitter for confirmation and comment and will update this story with any response.

Costolo stepping back from the U.K. directorship role appears related to the dissolution of TweetDeck: a U.K. startup which Twitter acquired in May 2011 for a price-tag that we reported as $40 million. Late last year TweetDeck failed to file U.K. accounts with Companies House, and continued failure to file ultimately led to the dissolution of the company as a separate entity earlier this month, on May 7.

TweetDeck’s failure to file accounts was part of a process to wind up its status as a separate corporate entity to its parent company. Earlier this month a Twitter spokesperson told the Guardian: “TweetDeck the product continues to thrive as part of Twitter, but the old company has been dormant for some time, with no outstanding liabilities; hence our agreement with the move to dissolve it.”

Once TweetDeck became a part of Twitter, with product development and other business processes moving in-house, there was no longer a need for it to exist as a standalone business in the U.K. It’s likely, therefore, that that shift also explains Costolo stepping back from his U.K. director role. His resignation took place on May 9, according to Sky News.

The news organisation reports that Costolo’s position has been replaced by a Dublin-based chartered accountant, Laurence O’Brien. That looks like a clear sign that Twitter’s main order of business in the U.K. is now minimising its tax liability, with the development that was associated with TweetDeck now rolled into its main business. The other two Twitter U.K. directors, Alex Macgillivray, Twitter’s general counsel and head of trust and policy, and chief operating officer, Ali Rowghani, remain in post.

Despite TweetDeck’s corporate dissolution and Costolo stepping back from his U.K. directorship there’s little doubt that Twitter remains committed to the product. Although it has recently shut down AIR-based versions of the Twitter client and shuttered mobile apps, it is focusing on developing TweetDeck’s web-based apps. Back in March,  Twitter noted that the TweetDeck team has doubled in size over the past six months.

Sky News notes that Twitter controls its U.K. firm through an Irish subsidiary known as Twitter International Company Ltd. And while Twitter has been expanding its staff headcount in its London and Dublin offices this headcount push is to build a multinational sales team for Europe, rather than being product development related.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Line, a free messaging app made by NHN Japan Corporation that’s competing with the likes of WhatsApp and Viber, has pushed past 150 million registered users globally, up from 100 million in January. Line launched back in summer 2011 in Asia, and is especially popular in Japan, but has been pushing outside its home region, expanding into the U.S., Europe and Latin America.

It’s worth noting that Line’s user metric is registered users rather than active users — the company does not break out the latter but Line’s U.S. CEO has previously told TechCrunch the proportion of registered to active users can be as high as 80% in its Asian markets.

For some comparative context on Line’s user figure, Viber announced it hit 175 million registered users back in February. While messaging giant WhatsApp doesn’t break out registered users but earlier this month said it now has more than 200 million active monthly users – claiming more monthly users than Twitter.

Line said its global growth has been helped by the more than 10 million registered users it has acquired in Spain since launching Spanish iOS and Android apps late last year. It has also kicked off a TV ad campaign to raise Line’s profile in Spain. Add to that, Line said it’s seeing “steady growth” in the Spanish-speaking South American region, having added French and Brazilian Portuguese versions of its apps in March.

Line offers free messaging and social networking services on its platform, focusing on the youth market with games, stickers and kawaii mascots also part of its platform — the latter now have their own cartoon show (called Line Town) in Japan.

Line said the combined download figure for 16 of the games it offers on its platform was more than 100 million as of March. While its official camera app, Line camera, passed 30 million global downloads this month.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Huawei, the world’s second-largest supplier of network gear by revenue, is pulling out of the U.S. after it sales efforts have been repeatedly stymied due to concerns over national security. According to a report in the Financial Times, executive vice president Eric Xu said at the company’s annual analyst summit yesterday that Huawei “is not interested in the U.S. market any more.” He added that the company has been gradually shifting its focus away from the U.S. over the last year as it seeks to expand in other global markets.

Huawei’s decision to pull out of the U.S. market is not a complete surprise. Earlier this month, Bob Cai, Huawei’s vice president in charge of wireless-network marketing, admitted the company’s U.S. growth will be hindered this year by security concerns, and that it’s looking toward Europe and Asia to grow its key wireless-network business.

But the decision still represents a represents a major setback for Huawei, which had been trying build up its U.S. business despite repeated efforts by politicians and security officials to label the Chinese company a threat to national security interests.

Huawei has now revised its long-term outlook for its enterprise business and now says that its goal of generating $15 billion in revenue from the business by 2017 is “too optimistic.” That target has been shaved down to $10 billion. The unit’s chief executive William Zu still expects revenues to grow 45 percent this year, up from 25 percent growth in 2012.

Xu’s vow to back away from the U.S. comes after the company suffered two major setbacks. Last October, a U.S. congressional report fingered Huawei and Chinese rival ZTE as a threat to national security, calling on U.S. government and private sector companies to avoid buying equipment from both. At the end of March, Sprint Nextel and Japanese telecom SoftBank promised the House intelligence committee not to use equipment from Huawei if they merge.

Despite a major lobbying campaign by Huawei, as well as an appeal by senior executive Ken Hu for the U.S. government to launch a formal investigation, which Hu said would clear his company, the U.S. congressional report hurt Huawei’s presence in the U.S. According to the Financial Times, Huawei has halted its U.S expansion, and its R&D staff has dropped from 800 to 500.

The U.S. congressional report was not the first setback dealt to Huawei by the U.S. government. Back in 2008, Huawei had to retract a bid for 3Com after finding out that the deal would not gain regulatory approval from D.C. In 2010, it lost a bid for a multibillion-dollar contract to supply network infrastructure to Sprint Nextel after the U.S. government intervened.

The U.S. government’s suspicious attitude toward Huawei stems in part from the military background of its founder Ren Zhengfei, who served as an engineer in the People’s Liberation Army. Huawei’s detractors worry that Ren still maintains close ties with the Chinese government.

Huawei has had more luck building out its global presence in Britain, where BT, Vodafone, and EE are its major customers, but its still faced a fair amount of scrutiny in Europe. Earlier this month, it was reported that the European Commission is seeking to investigate Huawei and ZTE for undercutting domestic firms by receiving state subsidies, a charge Huawei denied. An internal EU report last year also recommended that the EU take steps to limit the growth of Chinese telecoms equipment makers, citing domestic competition as well as threats to security.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Mobile advertising firm Velti has released its monthly report on advertising impressions across its network. The iPad is far and away the leader when it comes to the tablet market, and is gradually chipping away share from the iPhone in terms of overall dominance among mobile ads. The iPad mini remains a much smaller factor, but is growing steadily, and on the Android side it’s pretty much all about the Kindle Fire.

Velti’s data found that the iPad accounted for 91.6 percent of all tablet ad impression during the month of March, and only lost share to the iPad mini, which gained a full percentage point to come in at 6.2 percent during the month, firmly in second place. The Kindle Fire was the next strongest device, with a comparatively small piece of the pie at 1.6 percent. The Kindle Fire still dominates the Android tablet segment, however, with only the Galaxy Tab line of devices anywhere close. Amazon’s and Samsung’s tablets made up 73.4 percent and 26.2 percent of all Android tablet share, respectively.

Among phones, the iPhone still leads the pack, with the iPhone 4 still leading all handsets with 13.3 percent of the impression share. iPhones accounted for eight of the top 10 devices, with the Samsung Galaxy S II and S III coming in at 8th and 10th place, respectively. Samsung is running away with the Android market in terms of ads served according to Velti’s figures, with 68.2 percent of all Android impressions. That’s no surprise given the company’s clear continued dominance in terms of hardware sales.

In March, most mobile app usage took place during weekends, with a much greater deviation between Friday/Saturday/Sunday and the rest of the week than Velti had seen previously, which perhaps indicates that more people were settling down to do serious work during the month. Finally, Velti also saw click-through-rates continue to grow on Android and shrink on iOS. This means that despite having a much smaller share of overall ad impressions, the ones that are viewed on Android are more likely to convert into some kind of customers action.

That may be due to the more relaxed rules about what types of advertising and campaigns can appear within Android apps vs. those on iOS. Stil, iOS was better in terms of eCPM, but the gap narrowed between it and Android, meaning iOS users resulted in just a little less revenue on average than did Android users for advertisers.

The picture shows a fairly stable overall relationship between ads and the dominant mobile platforms, however; the needle hardly budged in terms of overall impressions. Will a flock of new devices coming to market affect this relationship in the coming months? Too soon to tell, though legacy handsets like the iPhone 4 and 4S, and the Galaxy S II still seem to be firmly entrenched.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Editor’s note: Jeremy Liew is a managing director at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Follow him on Twitter @jeremysliew.

As a VC, my interest in the Bitcoin ecosystem is not ideological but mercenary. I see the opportunity for Bitcoin to disrupt multi-billion-dollar markets, but in doing so also create new big markets. There are three key markets in Bitcoin:

Wallet. Holding your Bitcoins for you, serving some of the checking account functions of a bank.

Exchange. Converting from USD to Bitcoins and back.

Payments. Helping merchants accept Bitcoins for their transactions.

As a rule of thumb, VCs like to see billion-dollar markets to get excited. How can each of these markets get to be a billion dollars in size?

Wallet

It is free to get your own Bitcoin wallet, a piece of software on your computer that you can use to send or receive Bitcoins. However, this entails storing your Bitcoin private key on your computer, which risks loss or theft. Increasingly many Bitcoin users are turning to hosted wallets, which hold the money for you, and are accessed over the web. But you have to trust that your hosted wallet will not run off with your money (which has happened before). Because client wallets are free, hosted wallets have typically been free, as well.

Let’s assume that one day in the future, hosted wallets will be able to charge 0.5 percent of funds in the account as an annual fee. This is likely a high estimate, but not impossible if the wallet offers enhanced security, insurance against loss, and perhaps some kind of escrow or other fraud purchase protection. For the wallet market to be worth $1 billion, this would imply that $1 billion/0.5% = $200 billion in Bitcoins would need to be held in hosted wallets. This means that the market cap of Bitcoin would need to be at least $200 billion, relative to $1.5 billion today. Bitcoin would need to appreciate by almost 150x to reach this level. Bitcoin has gone up by 30x in the last year, so that isn’t impossible to believe. Two more years like that would get you there.

Exchange

It will be a long time, and probably never, that Bitcoin becomes the default world currency. As a result, there will be demand for exchanging between Bitcoin and fiat currency for a very long time.

Consumer level exchanges charge between 50 to 100 basis points on each trade. Bigger trades currently pay closer to 10 basis points. Let’s assume that in the future trading commissions run around 25 basis points. To get to $1 billion in market size we would need to see $1 billion/0.25% = $400 billion in annual trading volume. Last month, exchange volume was around $60 million, this month it looks like it may get to $200 million. Annualizing this gets you to between $720 million – $2.4 billion in annual trading volume. Assuming the top end of the estimates, trading volume would need to go up by 200x current levels to hit this market size.

Transaction volume, i.e. transfers of Bitcoin within the real economy, has historically floated within a constant multiple of trading volume of between 2 and 20. If the relationship between transaction volume and trading volume remains roughly linear, transaction volume would need to rise by 200x current levels to hit our target $1 billion market size. This is believable given that transaction volume has gone up 30x in the last year.

Payments

Ultimately, the key driver of both Bitcoin price appreciation and exchange volume has to be payments volume. If people aren’t using Bitcoin to pay merchants for transactions, then there is no real economic driver for either price or exchange volume to rise. It would be driven purely by speculation.

One of the key advantages of Bitcoin is that it nominally has zero transaction costs. That being said, there are a number of additional merchant services that could be added on top of transaction processing that could justify 25 basis points or more in merchant fees. Bitpay today charges 1% or more. To get to $1 billion in market size, we would need to see $1 billion/0.25% = $400 billion in annual transaction volume.

Last month, transaction volume was around $250 million, and this month it looks like it is on track for $750 million. Annualizing this gets you to between $3 billion and $9 billion in annual transaction volume. Again, taking the top end of estimates, this would require an increase in transaction volume of around 50x current levels. In the last year, transaction volumes have gone up by 30x. As a comparison point, world GDP is around $82 trillion, so this would represent about 0.5 percent of all world transactions using Bitcoin. As a comparison point, $2.5 trillion is spent on credit cards per year in the U.S. alone out of $15 trillion in GDP, so about 16 percent.

How Do We Get There?

All of these market-sizing analyses require a 2 to 2.5 order of magnitude increase over current levels. Those same metrics have shown a 1 to 1.5x order of magnitude increase in the last year, so it doesn’t stretch the imagination to think that it might be possible. But the question is how? It would be impossible to get to those sizes on illicit usage only and you can’t get there just on speculation. Bitcoin usage would have to become mainstream. The only way to get there is through merchant preference because of the lower transaction costs. This could be appealing to industries with low net margins (e.g. grocery, Amazon.com), or with high transaction costs (e.g. cross border trade, micro transactions), and these may be the industries that pioneer Bitcoin acceptance.

But merchants won’t switch to Bitcoin for lower transaction costs if the tradeoff is volatility of exchange rates. As long as their costs are in fiat currency, they will want to switch out of Bitcoin and into fiat immediately when they take payment since they won’t want to bear currency risk. That requires deep liquidity in the exchanges, and this is where the professional traders come in. They have already started to enter the market.

If the current volatility in the Bitcoin exchange rate is reduced in the future, merchants may be willing to hold Bitcoins for longer periods of time, and even make payments in Bitcoins.

The other way that Bitcoin may become mainstream is in countries where the currency or financial system is already more volatile than Bitcoin.

Mainstream adoption will require bright line regulatory compliance by all elements of the Bitcoin ecosystem. That is why last month’s guidance on virtual currencies from FinCEN (part of the U.S. Treasury) caused Bitcoin prices to go up. As Bitcoin gets closer to the U.S. regulatory umbrella, it moves closer to legitimacy. These rules and the ones that will follow will increase the overhead costs of all players in the space, but that is a small price to pay for legitimacy.

What Does It Mean For Startups?

Not all big markets are opportunities for startups. Bitcoin has some attractive characteristics because it is so disruptive to the current system. The innovator’s dilemma may keep the big players in payments out of the market for a long time, as they may fear cannibalizing their current very attractive margins. But one day that competition will come.

The key questions for any startup are: What is your competitive advantage and how do you defend against a large late entrant? For exchanges, liquidity is the barrier to entry. Although there have been examples where new entrants have cracked open marketplace businesses, it is hard. For wallet and merchant services, it is less clear what the barriers to entry will be.

The risks associated with Bitcoin are worth mentioning as well. The six biggest hacking, theft and fraud incidents involving Bitcoin exchanges, wallets, or investment vehicles have resulted in a total 1.2 million Bitcoins being stolen, out of a total of 11 million Bitcoins in existence. This means that more than 10 percent of all Bitcoin has been stolen, and this does not include many smaller thefts and losses from individual wallets. Just this week, another wallet service was shut down after suffering an attack. Given this environment, Bitcoin startups cannot remain bootstrapped for long and will need to raise more substantial capital from VCs to mitigate these risks with better security and proactive regulatory functions.

In all the scenarios that I’ve painted above, Bitcoin prices need to go up by 100x or more. If that were the case, then maybe just buying Bitcoin is a better investment than putting money into a Bitcoin startup. You get plenty of upside and no execution risk, but it won’t be anywhere near as much fun.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

HTC’s new flagship smartphone, the HTC One, will go on sale in the U.K., Germany and the company’s home market of Taiwan next week, HTC has confirmed today. The rollout will then ramp up “across Europe”, North America and “most of Asia-Pacific” before the end of the April.

The company had previously said the handset would start rolling out to customers “from mid-March”.

A HTC spokeswoman provided the following statement: “HTC has seen unprecedented demand for and interest in the new HTC One, and the care taken to design and build it is evidenced in early reviews. The new HTC One will roll out in the UK, Germany and Taiwan next week and across Europe, North America and most of Asia-Pacific before the end of April. We appreciate our customers’ patience, and believe that once they have the phone in their hands they will agree that it has been worth the wait.”

The One has a 4.7-inch 1080p screen — putting it close in screen size to ‘phablet’ territory — which is topped and tailed with aluminium trim. Inside it’s powered by one of Qualcomm’s new quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipsets, clocked at 1.6GHz, and also packs in 2GB of RAM.

In looks the One resembles BlackBerry’s Z10, and that’s not the only similarity between the two companies at this point. Both have a lot riding on their respective flagships as rivals have gobbled up huge chunks of the smartphone market.

HTC needs the One to fly, having struggled to make an impact in an Android space dominated by Samsung’s Galaxy series of devices. Earlier this month the company reported its lowest sales since January 2010. Sales for the month of February fell by nearly 44% to 11.37 billion Taiwan dollars ($384 million). But with falling revenues, HTC has fewer resources to marshal in its fight with Samsung — perhaps explaining the One’s staggered rollout — making it all the more important it gets a hit with the device.

Enders Analysis analyst Benedict Evans noted recently that HTC has now “given up every penny of revenue growth it picked up from Android” — illustrating the rise and fall on the following graph:

Evans added that while the HTC One “is a very nice phone” in the current highly competitive handset market nice hardware is ” insufficient to compete”. HTC will be hoping it can prove him wrong.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch